Lessons In Hiding Your Mistakes -
I think everyone will agree that building bass guitars (or any guitar for that matter) is basically an exercise in hiding all the parts where you messed up. This fretboard is one of them. As @RichterScale mentioned, the best plan here is to just find some scrap offcuts that the grain will sort of match up the best and glue them on. This is why you
do not throw away any tiny little scrap until you are
done with the build. I found some offcuts that looked like they might work, ran the ol' #5 over the edges to get them mating up as best I could, threw some glue at it and in the clamps it went -
Okay, let's let that sit while I deal with other things.
It's A Fretless, Buuut...... -
I'm not a fretless player, never even tried one. So I'm gonna need some help here in the old "where the heck is that note again?" department. Let's add some position markers, shall we? So, funny story. A couple years ago I purchased these boxes of laminate scraps from a guy who was otherwise gonna toss them. -
I think I gave him $10 for all this or something like that. I know it wasn't much, and at the time my wife said "Why? What are you gonna do with it?" I don't know, but I feel like it might come in handy at some point. It's been sitting on the top shelf ever since, aside from using a small bit of it for some turning blanks I glued up with stripes in them and one Celtic knot blank I glued up as well. But hey, what a perfect opportunity to use some of it here! Oh, and check out all that flame maple looking stuff! The box was marked curly maple, but it looks like flame to me! We should
definitely use that!
So, the first step is to tape my fretboard print out on this fretboard blank and then we have our positions located. This is why when I made the drawing, I put frets on the drawing. Then we can take the little saw and cut some angled slots that cover the side and a bit of the front -
After cutting the slots, we need laminates to go in there. Yes, the slots are not that clean, I'm aware. I'm hoping that the laminates and glue will hide any issues and that the major areas of break out will basically go away as I radius the board.
Obligatory shot of all the little laminates in a pile, along with a glue bottle. Let's do this! -
Probably way too much glue, judging by the amount of drips on my floor, but whatever.
I'll let this dry until tomorrow before I try to figure out how best to trim them before we start radiusing the board.
Now, Where Were We? -
So it took me a couple solid hours to work on the position markers. That other fretboard section should be ready to work with now, right? The glue bottle says "ready to unclamp in half an hour" and I've seen people say that you can work with it after a couple hours, we should be good to go, right?
Let's grab our little template we made earlier (yes, I like templates), grab a few supplies and do "The Trick" -
Then we can throw the little Amana pattern bit in the router table and flush trim this thing, right? Right?
I guess not. My router table basically said "Yeah no, I don't think so bruh!" -
What The Actual...... -
So yeah, that was fun. Mostly I'm just happy I could retrieve all the...parts.
Not cool man, not cool. I thought we were good to go, I even asked. I don't know what the deal was, I probably fed it the wrong direction or something. Anyways, let's give it a good slathering of glue, press it all back together, wrap some tape around it and try to recover from this one -
I'm gonna just walk away at this point. I'll come back tomorrow and untape it and see what we've got. I set out this morning thinking "I'd like to get the fretboard sorted today", clearly that didn't happen. But looking back, I did get a lot done. It just all went very, very slowly. that's enough fun for one day.
)
